Keep Off the Grass
by The Exile
Summary: Life in postgame Soleil, from the perspective of a certain business-smart little white flower who seems to be everywhere at once. Soleil aka Crusader of Centy, heavily inspired by Undertale.


Rafflesia Training Grounds was a disaster site again. Grass strewn around everywhere, cut and trampled, as though a rabid cow had rampaged through the fields. Soleil Plaza was relatively intact but someone had broken all the fence posts again to get through to the golden apple tree, and also jumped on one of the picnic tables until it broke for no particular reason. I skipped Soleil Town. Nobody does Soleil Town. The cow tries to eat us. We leave the Town to the crazy guy who sits near the Church all day, deliberately spinning against the wind.

Nothing ever happens in Dahlia Valley any more. We scattered some flower seeds on Mother Monster's grave as we went past.

The damage wasn't too bad at Anenome Beach – they tend to sift through the sand for coins there, or knock over the burrowing creature's homes to look for apples, instead of bothering the plants. Not much grows in Burn Daisy or Camellia Desert either, so we leave it out. Someone else does Saint Heaven – I have no idea how they get the authority to go in there. Maybe the beanstalk lets them in when nobody's looking. Medium Lily is my home base, as it were, with the other end of my patrol being a small outpost in Soleil Plaza maintained by my friend the Fortune Teller. With very little happening in Freesia, I managed to get home fast enough that the adventurer hadn't even gotten that far in their quest. I'm not sure what the hell all these quests are supposed to be, by the way, now that there are no monsters and the only violent criminal is behind bars. Maybe he keeps escaping. The prison guard always did look a little flaky.

What happened to the information monger gig? Well, it never really worked out. Sure, I made a ton of money, but scamming them blind didn't actually deter adventurers from cutting the grass. If anything, it made them destroy even more greenery looking for the coins to pay me. I even tried charging them life energy instead but they started replenishing their life with apples, which, of course, they tore up the grass looking for. I imagine whatever I asked them for in exchange for vital quest information – souls, Kingdoms, first-born daughters – they'd be convinced that the only possible place to find it in was the grass.

What does a flower actually spend money on? Well, mostly I hire help from Ramsey's, to get things done that you can't when you're a flower, such as replanting entire fields. I leave the money on the doorstep with instructions that the cat or the bat or whatever needs to be at a certain place at a certain time, preferably with a garden sprinkler. Being the wise old ram that he is, he never asks questions.

I bet you're also wondering how a flower even gets from place to place so quickly. You'd probably assumed it was a different flower each time and we just had an extensive information network, but now you're confused that I'm talking as though the flower in Soleil Plaza is the same as the flower in Medium Lily. It's actually quite simple: when you're a plant, one body doesn't correspond to one consciousness. As long as someone else isn't borrowing the body I want to use, astral hopping is incredibly easy. We sometimes try out sharing a body, or one person having more than one body, or even existing long term without a body, in an emergency, but it's mostly just painful and confusing. Like the time when some human soul (presumably dead) decided to try and possess one of the bodies my friend was about to jump in. It took twelve of us to shove him out again. I think he went after one of the slimes next.

Of course, you probably didn't even realise that we have souls. I'm sorry if I've upset any vegans. Actually, no, I'm not sorry I upset someone who specifically goes out of their way to eat me rather than anyone else.

Do I think the world has improved since the big change? Well, I never got on well with the monsters – Georaima in particular was always eating plant seeds – but they were no worse than cows, and it's kind of sad to see an entire species disappear from the face of the planet. I hope they got back safely to wherever it is they were going. I like to imagine there's a monster village somewhere with a town square and a Monster King and maybe a Monster Goddess, and a giant purple furry Monster Cow with horns and eyes all over its body, who lies around in a trailer all day, terrorising the Monster Plants. Except that Monster Plants probably eat you back. But anyway, I keep getting distracted. It's a habit I got into from my information monger days. I could pretend to have forgotten the question and then demand more money.

Yeah, nothing's really changed.


End file.
